Blue Bay Palace (Mauritius)

ISBN: 9781906300074 Price: £7.99 Click to buy

By Nathacha Appanah
Translated by Alex Stanton

WHEN she falls hopelessly in love, the lonely young Maya falls into the trap of thinking she will escape her poverty and find happiness away from her ramshackle home in the shadow of a luxury hotel in Mauritius.

But when the subject of her affections proves too weak to renounce his family and proceeds with an arranged marriage to a woman from the same Brahmin caste, love turns to hatred and Maya – whose name means “illusion” – descends into murderous madness.

Blue Bay Palace by Natacha Appanah is a tale about extremes: of beauty and ugliness, affluence and poverty, reason and madness, reality and illusion. It explores the dilemmas faced by a Hindu community caught between taboos and caste prejudices.

Maya discovers that she embodies the antagonisms of the diverse land she comes from - and learns to accept that it is only by embracing this identity that a glimpse of freedom becomes possible.

First published in French, Blue Bay Palace is one of the few contemporary novels from Mauritius to be published in English. The country’s writers have been gaining considerable attention since J. M. G. Le Clézio, the son of a Mauritian doctor, won the Nobel prize for literature in 2008.

Read an extract (Download PDF)

‘It is a remarkably distilled piece of writing, which reads like a bead of sweat trickling down your neck.’
- The Literateur

‘This is … despite the intensity of emotion, a story of how passion is intertwined with class and economic position’
- World Literature Today

REVIEW
The Literateur
Complete Review
School Library Journal
World Literature Today